Priscilla Chan, in rare interview, tells how her goals with Mark Zuckerberg are shaped by personal story

Priscilla Chan remembers seeing blood all over the boy’s face, a sign he had gotten jumped in his own neighborhood. For the first time, just looking at someone else hurt.

Chan, then a Harvard student and now a Bay Area philanthropist, pediatrician, mother and wife of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, was mentoring the child in an after-school program meant to quell gang violence in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Yet stellar tutoring and field trips to football fields and skating rinks couldn’t cure the student’s woes.

“I realized that my homework help was going to completely be futile if these kids couldn’t be healthy, safe and happy in the place that they lived,” a teary-eyed Chan told this newspaper in a rare interview. “That really drives a lot of what I decided to do in my life and career.”

Chan is the private face of the philanthropic couple, working quietly behind the scenes. While Zuckerberg is a prominent player among Silicon Valley’s tech elite and his life story is widely known, Chan rarely talks publicly about how her personal story has helped shaped the couple’s multimillion-dollar donations to schools and hospitals.

Wealth and power used to be foreign to Chan, the child of immigrant parents who fled Vietnam on refugee boats in the 1970s and never went to college.

Now Chan and her husband have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to improve education and health care for children, including in the Bay Area. They have vowed to donate 99 percent of their Facebook’s shares — worth more than $45 billion — to charitable causes.

And Chan, a former teacher, has taken it a step further. In October she announced she was founding and would be CEO of The Primary School, which will link health care and education for 50 families from East Palo Alto and Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood when it opens this fall. Teaming up with the Ravenswood Family Health Center, the free school, serving students from pre-K to eighth grade, will provide services from mental health to prenatal care for students and their families. The private school is funded by Chan and Zuckerberg, but they have not disclosed how much they are pumping into the effort.

Suddenly Chan, a San Francisco General pediatrician who has largely shied away from public attention, found herself in the spotlight as the doctor spearheading change for some of the Bay Area’s most disadvantaged children.It wasn’t one defining moment, but rather a series of experiences, that would lead Chan on a journey back to education, to a place between the classroom and doctor’s office.

While Chan was growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts, her family stressed the importance of school and hard work as the keys to a life better than the one the Chinese-Vietnamese refugees left behind.

But even in a place nicknamed the “Birthplace of the American Dream,” Chan knew her upbringing was different from those of other children raised in the Irish Catholic town.

“My identity, I felt, was so distinct. I felt very much like an outsider. My family didn’t have the same rituals that everyone else seemed to have,” she said.

Her Cantonese-speaking grandparents raised her and two younger sisters while her parents, Dennis and Yvonne, worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant and other jobs.

And while her parents never attended college, they wanted their daughters to do better, though it was an abstract idea rather than a road map filled with a list of specific colleges and test scores. Once, Chan told her mom she wanted to take the SATs. “What’s that?” her mom asked.

At Quincy High School, Chan’s teachers helped fill in the gaps.

Peter Swanson, her science teacher and tennis coach, remembered Chan asking if joining the tennis team could help get her into a college like Harvard. It wouldn’t hurt, he told her, along with straight A’s, advanced courses and high SAT scores. Voted “class genius,” Chan wasn’t a naturally gifted tennis player but worked hard to improve her reflexes on the court.

She became the captain of the tennis and robotics teams and graduated at the top of her class in 2003. Sure enough, Chan got accepted to Harvard early. “Teachers can inspire students, but students can inspire teachers,” Swanson said. “She was an inspiration.”

In her valedictorian speech, Chan quoted Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” She shared lessons she learned from traveling to Europe, China, Korea and Hong Kong with her grandmother, who she called “Mama.”

“Mama showed me that I didn’t have to change just because someone else saw things differently,” she told her classmates. “She showed me that having differences is normal and that I didn’t have to be afraid of the differences in all of us.”

At Harvard, surrounded by brick buildings, libraries and bronze sculptures, Chan saw the wealth of opportunities an Ivy League education could bring, the doors it could swing wide open.

But Chan felt out of place — even more than she did growing up Asian-American in Quincy. She felt as though she had gotten to the college by chance. Doubt crept into her mind, but so did the desire to give back.

“These opportunities for sure were not available to many of the people I grew up with,” Chan said.

So she went to the Phillips Brooks House Association, a student-run nonprofit at Harvard, and signed up for the Franklin Afterschool Enrichment program. Volunteers met at the front of Lamont Library, taking buses to the Franklin Hill and Franklin Field public housing units in Dorchester, where they tutored and mentored children. Initially a summer youth program for the children of Harvard University’s dining hall workers in the 1980s, it later expanded to serve the housing projects after a surge of gang violence in the 1990s.

Seeing a kid with blood on his face because he got jumped was the first time Chan felt visceral pain for someone else, but it wouldn’t be the last. She remembered searching for a girl who had missed days of school. When Chan found her in a park, she noticed the child’s front teeth were missing, another memory that brought tears to her eyes.